It was recently when I wrote the event report for our BGC Boardgame Retreat of last year and after going thru the list of games we did for Game Zero & Game One, there’s a strong urge to replay the games at our Friday OTK Meetups.

We did replay a couple of the Game One titles last Friday (during our Raya Meetup) but we are making this Friday the (official) Game One theme nite. So let’s take a quick tour of the Game One titles we played tonite.

PELOPONNES

First of the Game One games to hit the tables were PELOPONNES. While we did a 4-player session in the Retreat, tonight we’ve the full complement of 5 players.

Reference for Disaster tiles in French? My copy is the French edition from Blue Orange Games and not the English/German edition from Iron Games.

Aiyah…. just found out we did three major misplay for our session. So a replay is needed… haha.

The Conquest row is only needed if we’ve less than 5 players

When you maxxed out a resource – you get a luxury good for every time you cross the max line, but your resource remains at the max (not overlap into zero) – this is a key misplay since it would mean we should have more abundance of resources

Disaster is invoked only on the 3rd matching tile (not the 2nd)

If we are replaying, we should certainly try out some (or all) of the expansions for this game – Antioche, Goat, Hellas etc

MARS NEED MECHANIC

Over at the other table, Kareem was busy getting a few other gamers into MARS NEED MECHANICS. Kaz had earlier taught / played BUCCANEER BONES with CK / Athos group.

After having done BUCCANEER BONES, CK / Athos group picked up another short card game on their own – LOST LEGACY.

They also did KORYO and later LE HARVE (whew!)

ORIGIN

After finishing the MARS NEED MECHANIC session, some of the gamers moved on to ORIGIN, one of last year’s sleeper hits from Matagot.

They had a giant-sized version of ORIGIN on display at Essen last Spiel 2013 and this photo (above) looked like a giant-sized set (not!)

AFRICANA

We played AFRICANA – and also PACKET ROW – last week. And AFRICANA hits the table again today after this group’s done with Peloponnes.

AMONG THE STARS, PERGAMON

The two games we missed getting to the table were AMONG THE STARS and PERGAMON. We didn’t get to do PACKET ROW today as well but since we did it last week, can kira as “played” la. 😛

Kaz did ask for AMONG THE STARS (after Africana) but we decided to do something new to the group ie MISSION: RED PLANET. Didn’t know CK / Athos group was looking to try Among the Stars. Next time la….

MISSION: RED PLANET was not a Game One in our last Retreat but surprisingly was a game none of the gamers from the AFRICANA session has played before. So off it comes from the shelf onto the OTK tables.

In this game, you and the rest of the gamers attempt to send your astronauts to board any of the five spaceships in order to fight for majority control of any – or all – of the ten zones in Mars.

Each player has a set of 9 astronaut cards where you get to choose one of the characters to play in each of the 10 rounds.

This is similar to CITADELS with the characters being called out in sequence, and players who selected to play a particular character would get to execute the character’s abilities when it’s sequence is called out.

For eg if the Scientist character is selected by a player, he gets to send two astronauts to two separate spaceships and also draw an Event card (which can either be a Bonus or Discovery card).

Characters once played remain on the table as “used”, and cannot be selected again until the player selects the Recruiter character (which allows him to pull back all used cards into his hand).

There are some nasty character cards such as the Saboteur which allows you to destroy a ship that’s still on the ground, killing all astronauts on board (if any). Such “dead” astronauts are sent to the Lost in Space memorial. LOL

Above: Gray was the first player to have astronauts in the Lost in Space Memorial when a spaceship filled with 4 gray astronauts was destroyed by Kaz when he played the Saboteur card.

Another example of a nasty character is the Femme Fatale which allows you to switch one opponent’s astronauts into yours!

Each spaceship has different capacity (indicated by the number in red circle). Once a spaceship is full (ie the number of astronauts onboard = capacity), it’ll launch – and be on it’s way to Mars.

Above: Destination tiles indicating which of the ten zones in Mars a spaceship is heading to

There are two types of spaceships; some with a fixed destination (to one of the ten zones) and some without a destination. the latter allows the first astronaut boarding it to select where it wants to go.

Each of the ten zones in Mars provides one of three resources – ice being the cheapest at 1 VP and eranium the most expensive at 3 VP. The player who has majority control of a zone would get to claim majority bonus VP (tokens) at round 5, round 8 and round 10 (this is a 10-round game).

Getting crowded on MARS: The fight for majority can get pretty brutal towards the end-game since the stakes (ie VP bonus) were much higher!

MISSION: RED PLANET was a 2005 Asmodee release and has been OOP for a very long time! FFG is supposedly re-printing this but it’s not confirmed if they are re-theming it (like DUNE). Hopefully FFG would keep to this steampunk artwork / theme.

That’s it for our GAME ONE theme nite. We are looking forward to GAME TWO theme nite next Friday?

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